Religion Dispatches
…ple. It’s what you can do for yourself and others. As it is, White evangelical Protestants have it both ways. A vote for apartheid free of consequence, free of guilt….
Read More…mmensely polite attitude of people searching those coming into Tahrir. The free teas that were spreading all around Tahrir, no doubt paid for through the charitable support of someone in the crowd, or donated by the tea-shop owner – its just another part of the Egypt I have always known. But the Egypt I have known would never have seen people feeling free to voice their criticisms of the president so strongly or openly – that type of attitude cert…
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…e nothing. Like I was a ghost. But it also made me feel giddy, joyful, and free. I could not take my eyes from it. Night after night, I took the Time-Life book to bed with me and I read it until I could read no more. This quiet but transformative introduction to deep time started me off on a terrific three-year-long obsession with dinosaurs and evolution and geology and astronomy. Other encounters with nature had similar effects on me: They made m…
Read More…es. Lebanese Muslims work predominately as businesspeople in the lucrative Free Trade Zone, one of the largest free trade ports in the world. In the city center, many residents are descendants of West Indian laborers on the Panama Canal throughout the twentieth century. The city has one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. Every year, a group of black Muslims in Colón hosts an event to celebrate Eid-ul-Udha, a holiday that marks the end…
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…vating the most refined bourgeois values. Yet as an advocate of individual freedom and as a Jew with relatively newly-minted political rights, he also had to promote the democracy of the Third Republic against its ultra-nationalist conservative critics. Of course democracy could so easily lead to laws and values dictated by the masses—the same rude mobs calling for Dreyfus’ blood in the streets of Paris. How, then, to harmonize free thought with…
Read More…Smith jurisprudence,” she wrote. RFRA didn’t expand the scope of religious freedom rights, and in the case law there is “no support for the notion that free exercise rights pertain to for-profit corporations.” There’s a reason for that, Ginsburg maintained. While the Constitution and the courts have long recognized a “special solicitude” for religious organizations, there is no such solicitude for commercial entities. The reason for that is “hardl…
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…itism, Islamophobia, (anti-)Zionism, and Israel (not to mention democracy, free speech, and open dialogue). These debates would be more fruitful if informed by the way scholars of religion approach their subject matter. As a starting point I’ve found Harvard Divinity School’s Religious Literacy Project and its four principles (which also happen to be guiding principles of RD) to be helpful in the classroom: Devotional religious expression is disti…
Read More…onsequential things. They matter. Sure, in the modern world we do have the freedom to choose our guiding stories. And, here in postmodernity, we do have theories that relativize and contextualize, making that choice seem arbitrary. But none of this means that, once we’ve chosen an idea, it exists in a vacuum, tickling our minds and having no effect on things like, say, funding for scientific research, or the rights of children to have a public edu…
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…ey very often will have downloadable apps—you might find that your data is free to share with anybody. And of course you’ve signed yourself in, you’ve signed in your children, you’ve shared your vulnerabilities. Charles mentioned mental health, but it’s not just mental health, it’s vulnerabilities in general. After all, as a European, it’s interesting to watch how churches in the States, they fill every need. You have preschool, you have a couple’…
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…on’s comment about Haitians swearing a pact with the devil in exchange for freedom from the French is an allusion to an event that took place in Haiti on August 14, 1791. On that date, several hundred slaves from different ethnic groups came together in a place called Bois Caiman to conduct a Vodou ceremony. They sacrificed a pig to the lwa (the spirits of Vodou), and vowed that they would do whatever it took to break free from their bonds. What f…
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